Twitter is Rolling Out a Quality Filter

Twitter announced some new changes that are in the process of being rolled out to users. Their blog post about the changes is titled: “New Ways to Control Your Experience on Twitter”. These new features are intended to give Twitter users more control over what they see and who they interact with on Twitter.

When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters low-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience.

It goes on to say that the feature will not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with. Every user gets to choose for themselves if they want to use the quality filter feature. You can turn it on or off whenever you want (and can find it in your notification settings).

The other feature is a change that allows Twitter users to limit the notifications they see. Starting today, everyone will be able to limit notifications to only people they follow on mobile and on Twitter.com. Just like with the quality filter setting, Twitter users can decide for themselves if they want to make use of this change to notifications.

I’m assuming that when Twitter says the quality filter will filter out duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, they mean it will filter out spam accounts and those annoying automatic direct messages people push out seconds after someone follows them. It is unclear if it will, or will not, filter out Tweets that were automatically scheduled (via the use of something outside of Twitter itself).

Ideally, I want to believe that the quality filter, that looks at “account origin and behavior” will put an end to the serial harassment that occurs far too often on Twitter. I’m also hoping the quality filter will finally make looking at a trending hashtag (or any other hashtag, for that matter) nicer by finally filtering out the accounts I’ve blocked.